Now that a few reviews of Jaeth’s Eye has rolled in, I wanted to speak a little about what I was trying to do when I first wrote the novel. (There’s probably some spoilers here, so keep that in mind if you’re already starting on the novel and want to figure a few things out yourself).
One of my personal “rules” about writing character-driven fiction is that every situation that happens, happens because of the characters’ decisions. While plot comes into play too, I am always more interested in how characters respond to a plot, and form the narrative around how the characters deal with such situations.
The major complaint people have about Jaeth’s Eye is that a bunch of things happen in the beginning that don’t quite make sense.
But before I get to that, let me kind of touch on how ambitious The Agartes Epilogues really is. The entire trilogy revolves around this beast created through necromancy by the witch Naijwa during a massive tantrum. This creature used her own unborn child as the base, and it carried with it a lot of negative human emotion–pettiness, greed, hate, envy, loneliness. Vile things. Most people are affected by it–some are not.
Now, as a sort of juxtaposition to that theme, we have Kefier. And Kefier, you know, is a great guy and all, but (like most of my characters) he’s carrying a lot of baggage: he grew up under the shadow of an intelligent and talented older brother, who was clearly favoured by their father, who valued education above all else. In contrast, he’s a pretty simple fellow. He’s also dyslexic.
So what you see in the first chapter of Jaeth’s Eye is someone who is trying to figure out something for “himself,” but he hasn’t really had the chance to. And now you have his friend Oji, who sort of became another elder brother figure to him in the absence of his real one. He loves Oji, but this is something he can’t get out of his system–being told what to do, not having anything that’s really “his.” Even the woman he loves is, quite literally, a whore. Oji points this out to him, a thing he doesn’t really appreciate.
Resentment. Anger. Pettiness. Envy. Loneliness.
This is where the unreliable narrator bit comes through.
Many of these feelings aren’t easy to deal with. They’re certainly not easy to deal with when you fuck up.
Are you following me?
I write in a very limited 3rd person style. Which means that if a character isn’t aware of something, they don’t see it. So if you have a character who is lying to himself or herself, then no one’s really going to point it out to you. It’s just going to feel “off.”
When I was writing Jaeth’s Eye, I wanted to write a novel you could deconstruct bit by bit once you already know how the story ends. In fact, the entire trilogy is sort of structured for a re-read. You should be able to see where the characters pull their punches, so to speak…the things they avoid talking about, the thoughts they avoid thinking.
The novels are character-driven, so everything is structured around these characters’ personal quests, not the plot.
Kefier’s quest is for a sense of purpose.
Ylir’s quest is all about control, or the loss of it.
Sume’s quest is all about choices.
And they lie. They lie all the fucking time. They’re fighting against these things, against their own insecurities and emotions.
Like I said, it’s ambitious. I didn’t hit every point a hundred percent, but then again, no author ever really does. We’re just trying to tell a story, trying to express something, trying to paint a picture–the final image of which we’re not even really sure of.
